Dirty Projectors

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Dirty Projectors performs Thursday, September 20, at Rudyard's, 2010 Waugh, 713-521-0521. Ecstatic Sunshine is also on the bill.

Avant-garde pop exhibitionists Dirty Projectors may have authored the most traumatic punk homage ever attempted. After discovering an empty cassette case for Black Flag's 1981 debut Damaged among some childhood relics, DP mastermind Dave Longstreth decided to resurrect the album entirely from memory, and delivered the electrifying, deranged, totally ingenious abstraction Rise Above. Produced in part by Grizzly Bear's Chris Taylor and released on Secretly Canadian/Jagjaguwar's new Austin-based offshoot Dead Oceans, Rise Above boasts both pastoral flutes and clamoring thrash. It also ate up most of the set list for the Projectors' last tour, but this time should bring selections from earlier works like New Attitude, The Getty Address and Slaves, Graves and Ballads. Longstreth's dizzying melodies and oft-histrionic croon, alternately soulful and shrill, will be backed by incredible female harmonies and the foursome's frenetic, polyrhythmic ­finger-picking style — the same night, ironically, original Flag-waver Henry Rollins's spoken-word revue pulls into Meridian.